Start your week with sex… or lack thereof. Delve into the jungle of the newly out and single every Monday morning in Sexual Disorientation.

In recent weeks, my move across the country has required a good deal of navigation through a new community, and that navigation has required gaydar. A common misconception about gaydar is that it has only two readings: gay or hetero. In fact, any frequent user of this skill knows that many people give signals somewhere in between.

There are people who are gay and don’t know it yet; people who are gay but are quiet about it; people who maybe are hetero but who get gay when they drink. As a queer person, I find myself not only taking notice of people I check off as being gay – and thus possible allies, hookups or competitors – but also those who check out as “maybes.”

On a ship, when one needs to track movement on radar, one can use a homing beacon – a tracking device placed on another vessel so as to plot out its path. It dating, is it appropriate to throw a homo beacon on the closet cases we wish to keep in sight? And if so, how do we draw the line between watching the closet, feeling around inside, and actually pushing people out?

As I wrote about two weeks ago, the group with whom I’m currently sequestered has a lot of people in relationships and few openly gay individuals. Seeing no low-hanging fruits, I realized that I may have to look towards higher branches. The more I thought about it, the more potential queer people I realized were around me.

What are the signs? For one thing, Facebook signaling. While I get frustrated at the marketing of ourselves we are forced to do through “the book” and other networking systems, one interesting phenomenon are the people who opt not to select who they are interested in – men, women, or both.

I have noticed that for many women, not putting interested in men (and rather leaving the field blank) can just be a sign that they aren’t actively looking for a relationship. In other words, creepy hetero guys who are looking at this page, you needn’t be bothered bothering with me.

But for men, not putting your interest – at least if you have all other personal information filled in – tends to be a clear sign of queerdom. For heterosexual men, projecting anything other than pure certainty in your undivided attraction towards women is the social equivalent of being sterilized. I suspect that heterosexual men on the whole have a tendency to see things more in black and white than women or homosexual men, as evidenced by the fact that so many of them are Republicans.

When I saw that a cute guy I had met wasn’t interested in anyone on his profile, my first thought was that maybe there was a chance he could be interested in me. But how to figure it out? A flirty conversation here, a smile there… Trying this has yielded nothing. And meanwhile, I have left facebook for a bit of an internet break, and no longer had that tool with which to observe and make my intentions subtly known.

Step number one was complete – homo beacon placed. He was on my radar, my gaydar, and every other kind of -dar one could think of, except for the Daughters of the American Revolution. I knew that the time had come to implement step number two: the feel-out.

The only problem was that I am incredibly bad at doing this. He already knew I was gay, which is both a plus – I know that we aren’t both playing the gaydar game – but also a minus – if I did something too flirty, he wouldn’t be able to write it off as innocent heterosexual behavior. Trying to flirt with potentially hetero men without risking a fist in one’s face is always a difficult balancing act. At the very least, playing it wrong can be humiliating.

Example: at a party on a warm afternoon, I go to make my exit and say goodbye to the gentleman in question. I think that we are doing a hand pull – fist pound combo as he holds his hand up to me. He thought we were doing a high five. I end up holding his hand for 6 seconds before realizing that I need to move on.

I’m also not good at feeling out others who know the person. With this particular gentleman I have several friends in common, but I can’t bring myself to ask the question, “Do you think he’s gay?” With that one line I would lay all of my cards on the table, and things could easily get around to him. Even if he is gay, it’s not exactly a power play to let someone hear through the grape vine that you are shyly interested and stalking him through mutual acquaintances.

It also raises the question of whether or not to take things to step number three, when the transition occurs from feeling someone out to feeling them right out of the closet. How do we inquire without instigating? Do we need to put respect for potential closet cases over our own sexual ambitions?

On the one hand, I am not overly sympathetic to closet queers who are socioeconomic conservatives and go to church every Sunday to hear a pastor preach against homosexuality, and then hop online and find other “bros” to screw on the weekends. (I’m making this comment male-centric firstly to mock the term “bro” and secondly because I don’t know that this is so widespread among women.)

On the other hand, I am sympathetic to people who are respectful of the out gay community and simply are not yet, or do not ever want to be, in that place themselves – people who are true to themselves but in a different way than I am, or who are still working through issues about their sexuality. And I wouldn’t want to feel like I was being the kind of gossipy, backstabbing, drama queen that make some people resent the gay community as a whole.

If you aren’t going to push someone out of the closets via proxies and innuendo, you have to do it the direct way. You can try to massage your way in, to get the person drunk enough to show her or his true colors, or find an excuse to be alone and start losing your clothes. But none of these are for me. I’m not nearly bold enough to pull it off, and if I got caught trying and hadn’t indeed found a homo- or bisexual, I think that I would sooner die than show my face in public again.

So here is what I am left with. On Saturday night, I see the guy in a busy courtyard. I am smoking and reading poetry – Ferlinghetti, I think – by the light of the moon. We talk for a few minutes, but I run out of things to say. He goes one way and I go the other, with trails of Marlboro vapors fading behind us into the night. He’s on my radar screen, but he may be just a blip.